Thursday, June 23, 2016

Here it is. Another episode about the lives and loves
of those who read the Ask Polly column. It’s another sad story from someone who
reads Polly religiously, takes her writings seriously and even has a dumbass
therapist adding to her misery.

One would say that it feels like the blind leading the blind
but that would be insulting to the visually challenged. It reads more like a
whine-a-thon, where Polly and the woman who calls herself Trainwreck are
competing to see who can whine the best and the most.

(Before proceeding, I will mention that the movie called “Trainwreck,”
written and starred in by one Amy Schumer is far better than I had expected. It’s
a well-constructed romantic comedy and follows the rules of the genre fairly
closely. Whatever you think of Schumer’s jejune political opinions, she has put
together a good story. And that is a very difficult thing to do. She deserves considerable credit.)

In the meantime, Ask Polly’s letter writer—Trainwreck—is a
needy, whiny hookup artist. She hooks up with men who tell her that they do not
want relationships and then convinces herself that she is in love.. Worse yet, she convinces herself that he really loves her. She opens her heart and
soul, sharing her deepest secrets, only to be rejected because she is too much
for a man. Her whining is obviously oppressive, but she cannot see it.

Apparently, Trainwreck believes that if Amy Schumer can
transform hooking up into true love in a movie that other people should be able
to do it in real life. Someone ought to explain to her the difference between
movies and real life.

On this point, Polly is on the mark. After whining on about
her own life and her own foibles—because we have not heard enough about that—Polly
gets to the point:

So stop
asking for water and then pretending it’s wine. Ask for wine. And if your wine
tastes like water, send that shit back! Don’t pretend that you didn’t want wine
in the first place. DON’T FUCK THE DUDE WITH THE WATER AND THEN TELL HIM ALL
YOUR SECRETS.

Yes, I recognize that the expression is infelicitous. The trope
does not work. But, when reading Ask Polly you take the precious few nuggets of
wisdom when and where you can find them.

Of course, Polly wants Trainwreck to give herself a pep
talk, to be a cheerleader… because she deserves love. No one really knows what
that means, but Trainwreck is acting like she does not deserve much of
anything.

One feels constrained to note that in the Amy Schumer opus,
the heroine becomes a cheerleader at the end, but a cheerleader for the man she
loves, not for herself.

Points for Amy. Demerits for Polly.

Outside of the world of romantic comedy, hookups with men
who tell you they do not want relationships rarely turn out well. Trainwreck
laments her own condition:

Our
semi-relationship started from the ashes of the last one, six months ago. I was
looking for a quick hookup in a city I was visiting to numb the pain of being
rejected, and what started as a casual flirtation quickly evolved into a
long-distance “romantic friendship” (?).

I told
him all my secrets, things I had never told anyone, and he kept asking
questions. He seemed more interested in me, like, as a person, than anyone ever
has before.

We
shared a lot of intimate things and a lot of silly things, jokes and opinions
and stories and ideas. He told me from the start he could never have a real
relationship, with me or with anyone. I thought that was okay because he was
far away and I am moving even farther in a few months, and so really in the
long run I never thought about us “ending up together.” I guess I thought that
I was doing okay at not taking things too seriously. Still, in the short term,
we ended up very close.

To which her idiot therapist tells her that she tends to
fall in love with unavailable men. The problem is that she fucks men she does
not know and then, when she feels the inevitable oxytocin rush, decides that
she is in love—as though that is the ultimate arbiter of her relationship. She
is being led around by heart and loins. All of those Ask Polly columns have put her mind to sleep.

By opening herself to him, and failing to notice that he is
not reciprocating, Trainwreck goes off the rails. He probably sees her as a
good lay, one who has the added virtue of living in another city. She, like a
normal woman, does not want to be reduced to a courtesan. She seems to prefer
becoming something like a wife. To be fair, neither Trainwreck, her therapist
nor Polly have any awareness about this point.

Whatever flicker might have been ignited by their hookups,
Trainwreck does not understand that coming across as needy and
desperate does not attract men. It is a price exacted for the hookup and after
a time the price appears too high. Whatever they are discussing she keeps
bringing it around to his feelings. She harasses him, hectors him and interrogates
him:

Today
we were meant to have a short talk to make plans. It started that way. But he
had been so fickle that I wanted to make sure it was a good idea for both of
us. So I asked questions. I asked if he was sure, and if he thought it was
really a good idea, and if he cared about me. He said he was sure and that he
cared about me. Then he said he never wanted to talk about if he cared about me
again.

What kind of a fool does not know that whining about
feelings is a major turnoff? Apparently, Trainwreck is on that list. So are her therapist and Polly. While Polly is right about what this woman should not
be doing, she encourages the woman’s bad habit of opening her mind and heart to
her latest hookup.

From the depths of her anguish, Trainwreck asks this
question:

I guess
my real question is this: Am I really that bad? What am I supposed to do? I
feel like maybe I could have hidden my doubts and worries and kept it light and
fun and I could have finally gotten what I wanted. But part of me doesn’t want
to do that. I wanted something real. And we had always talked about things like
that before and he had been very empathetic toward me, seeming like he was
self-aware and very attuned to the kind of person I was … but now he’s just
tired of me.

No, she is not bad. But she is very badly advised. She is a
victim of the therapy culture.

The paragraph fascinates. Trainwreck refuses to play a
little coy, keep her head on her shoulders and not let herself be led around by
her emotions… because she believes that exercising some intelligence, making a
plan, sticking to the plan, developing a strategy that is slightly more thought
out than dropping her pants for the next cute guy, all of that would be unreal.

Wherever did she learn that getting what she wants would be
unreal? Probably from a therapy culture that mindlessly insists that people be
open, honest and shameless. I have been inveighing against this bad advice for
many years now. Trainwreck should have paid attention.

In truth, and in experience, women who set their minds to
the task are enormously competent in matters of love and romance. They have a
home field advantage. If they are intelligent about it, they can usually
maneuver a situation in order to get what they want. In the case of Trainwreck what is called liberation has liberated women from their minds and
made them into bundles of inchoate emotions.

Note the way Trainwreck describes her lost love: he was
empathetic and self-aware. This is girl talk. She does not see him as a man,
but as a chick with a dick. She has nothing to say about what he does in this
world. She does not say whether he is successful or unsuccessful. She does not
even mention his age. In short, she has nothing relevant to say about him as a
man and she does not understand why he feels suffocated by her. We applaud him for escaping.